“My daddy likes a Guinness,” said my mother, recalling the bitter taste of the yellow-labeled bottles that my grandfather occasionally brought into the house and that she had tried herself once when his back was turned. “He goes down to the pub every Wednesday and Friday night, as regular as clockwork. On Wednesdays he limits himself to three pints with his pals and comes home at a respectable time but on Friday nights he gets polluted. He’ll often come in at two o’clock in the morning and rouse my mother from her bed to cook him a plate of sausages and a ring of black pudding and if she says
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